The media model builds in us the same kind of relationship to the material as others feel toward dependency on substances of one kind or the other. It all comes to dependency on the material in one form or another and not a relationship with the becoming self or an individuating community of becoming selves. It tells us that our immaterial and very human needs become best answered by the material. We can have the unconditional, the inevitably friendly and caring voices tell us, but there's only one condition. We must correct the flaw, repair the defect, revise the unacceptable and the unconditional will be ours—conditionally. [168]
When we encounter ourselves in the media, on television or even the Internet, we find ourselves defective, diseased, and disordered. The voices we find there tell us this in a very concerned almost intimate way. They invite us to find friendship and companionship with them in some form or all forms of media-land and popular culture. If we make that choice, which we may not even notice, we may also isolate ourselves from others because we feel in a position to judge them. When we come to look at the mechanisms of the advertising and the programming, we will find a very strange symmetry, but one that works to make for a pattern of feeling that draw us into that form of reality, into that world which then dominates us, dominates our perceptions, or thinking, and our actions. It will endlessly tell us that we are defective in our bodies, our homes, in our minds, in our sexual lives, and simply an unacceptable product on a flooded market. However, the media model will also offer us images of others in far worse shape especially, as I understand it, in what the media is pleased to call "reality shows." We may also know these programs as "reality television," which comes as one of the more oxymoronic expressions we can find.[169] At least, the television voices tell us, we don't live in the truly incompetent, outlier reality of the people in the programming presented.[170]
For all our deficits as human beings, the programmers tell us, at least we can feel humorous contempt for the people who horde, the people who get arrested, the people who fight with each other, for the people who are not us. In that this comes to us as entertainment, we must feel superior to the people we see in the media otherwise they wouldn't amuse us. This may even hold true for the celebrities we see in the same artificial environment given that people so despise them when they appear in the gossip newspapers, magazines, and television shows which expose all their many problems and disasters. It's a neat trick. At the same time the media exploits our human and identity vulnerabilities, it assuages the fears and trepidations of our ego by giving us sacrificial victims of the consumerist conformity it proposes and promulgates. The media doesn't need to use propaganda to promote itself. It is propaganda every moment of its intrusions into our lives and minds. It makes form out of the seeming chaos, or we might see the media model form as another type of chaos, and it seductively invites us into their reality, their world, their chaos.
This world exists in the media model, but when we get drawn into that world, that reality, we may well take on some if not all of its attributes. It sees a world without the moral sphere, without the ends principle, and nearly if not completely devoid of the I/Thou. Unconditional positive regard finds precious little or no space and couldn't in a material world based on commerce in non-existent needs it creates, and makes the zero-sum game our norm. Assuming the environments we choose as a place to spend time and attention influence us, build meaning perspective within us, and offer us convenient forms of speech generally and small talk specifically, and cause us to see the world as presented, we might choose to ask ourselves what this form of entertainment and information does to us.
We can reduce it to a single question, simple on its surface, but the one we have discussed for this entire writing. What does the media model and reality do for us in our search for the becoming self, in our finding and exercising our individuation and autonomy?